Transparent point-to-point connections between two customer sites are one of the most popular services offered by Public Carrier Networks. Over the years, this service has been provided in a variety of forms, such as T1, T3, Frame Relay, Asynchronous Transport Mode (ATM), and Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVCs). While point-to-point connection services at an Ethernet layer provide superior speed, they do not scale well for larger networks containing a large number of processing nodes. For example, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) protocol used in point-to-point connection services is slow in converging to changing network topologies.
Layer 3 protocols, such as the Internet Protocol (IP), are designed to scale well for larger networks, and converge much faster. However, nodes in an IP network must support complex layer 3 routing tables and routing protocols such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) which add complexity to the network routers, switches, and other network processing nodes.
The present invention addresses this and other problems associated with the prior art.